Actions from Romeo GuzmánMovable Type Pro 4.382015-06-19T17:00:39Zhttp://www.kcet.org/user/profile/eakaplan/feed/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=feed&_type=actions&username=romeoguzm%C3%A1nPosted Migrant Dreams and Soccer Journeys to Departures Columnstag:www.kcet.org,2015:/socal/departures/columns//1488.833442015-06-20T00:00:39Z2015-07-28T21:59:46ZIf life is like soccer, then its many lessons are to be found in the journey as well its destination, especially for Juan Sanchez, who grew up in the working class neighborhoods of the San Gabriel Valley.Romeo Guzmánhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1488&id=17555In Partnership with the South El Monte Arts Posse"East of East" is a series of original essays about people, things, and places in South El Monte and El Monte. The material traces the arrival and departures of ethnic groups, the rise and decline of political movements, the creation of youth cultures, and the use and manipulation of the built environment. These essays challenge us to think about the place of SEM/EM in the history of Los Angeles, California, and Mexico.
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Below a crisp blue sky lies an open field of green. Its perfectly trimmed Bermuda grass is a uniform hue, devoid of light greens and browns. This bed is framed by two sets of rounded goal posts with white nets that cut through space with the precision of a spider's web. Every element of this spatial configuration is deliberate, conducive to its purpose of playing soccer in as perfect form as possible.

Under the direction of Juan Sanchez, the Mount San Antonio Community College soccer team has come pretty close to perfection. This San Gabriel Valley based college squad is one of the best the state, winning the state championship four times and national championship twice. Each year, Juan Sanchez meticulously selects local players, creates a formation and game plan for the season. He is precise, able to see hidden designs of the game that other less incisive observers might miss. He is also able to see in each individual player, the intricacies of their often complicated lives as they manage college life with work, family and other factors. He has a keen eye for the details that shape their personal character and eventually determine their life paths on and off the pitch. Sanchez's own journey as a successful soccer coach has been formed by his hardships. Moreover it's a life journey that began well before his birth, and continues today into the many divergent paths of his students and players.

Soccer runs in the blood of Sanchez's family, from his father, down to his own children, each generation inheriting a shared seriousness for the sport that is truly more a way of life. His father, Aurelio, was a milkman in the outskirts of Guadalajara, with a passion for soccer. Like most young men, he grew up playing soccer in the city's cobble stone streets and dirt fields, until at 17 years of age, he was picked up by a local professional team. However, despite his promising future, Aurelio's father prohibited him from traveling outside of Guadalajara. With his soccer career cut short, Aurelio bought a bus, started a route, and soon married Bernice, Sanchez's mother. Don Manuel, a family friend located in Los Angeles, offered Aurelio money to defend his team's goal posts on the weekends and labor in his factory Monday through Friday. He eventually moved Sanchez and his family to the San Gabriel Valley.

This is how Sanchez's family became an immigrant family. This came with cultural and financial challenges as Sanchez learned to adapt. They rented a small garage, attached to a house, in Pico Rivera. It lacked air conditioning, a heater, windows, and plumbing. To use the bathroom they had to go into the main house. They saved their money and moved into an apartment on Klingerman Street, near El Monte's Maxon Elementary School. Sanchez did not like school, but took advantage of recess to play soccer on the black asphalt pitch: "I remember clearly that one day I was walking around with my black shoes, no shoe laces. We're playing soccer and I kicked the ball. Shoe came flying out, and I lost my shoe. They sent me to the office and I tell the nurse 'I lost my shoe, I lost my shoe.' She said, 'You lost your tooth? We can't find your tooth.' I remember the whole school day walking around without a shoe."

But in their new home, they found stability in the constancy of soccer, particularly on the fields at Whittier Narrows in South El Monte, where he played his first official games. The white chalk lines that marked the field's boundaries were often crooked, the grass was both overgrown and worn with patches of dirt in its most used areas, and the soccer nets hung loosely from top to bottom. Despite the humble field, Sanchez's inherited talent manifested itself and together with his father, began constructing a shared futbolero dream. Sanchez was not endowed with great physical attributes. In fact, he was consistently one of the shorter and smaller players on the field. But he had a tremendous work ethic, and under the guidance of his father practiced regularly and became a skilled attacking player. In addition to having a strong right foot, he had uncanny ability to read the game.

After a few years, cheaper rent and more affordable homes convinced the Sanchez family to move east to Pomona, where Sanchez attended Garey High School. While this school fielded strong soccer teams, it offered very little academically. "No one knew what college was at Garey," Sanchez remembered. "You go to high school, you go work." Fortunately for Sanchez, by playing for the Walnut Valley Santos, a club team based in the affluent city of Walnut, he learned that there was "something outside of high school, outside of Pomona."

It was through soccer that Sanchez's horizons opened up to include college. After Garey he planned to attend California State University at San Diego, but a visit to the Cal State Los Angeles (CSULA) campus quickly altered his plans. Rick Rodriguez, a soccer pal, was scouted by CSULA and invited Sanchez to accompany him. A first-generation college student, the young Sanchez was surprised to find that the head coach was none other then Leonardo Cuellar, a former Pumas player and member of Mexico's 1970 World Cup Team. Coach Cuellar, for his part, was familiar with the name of this young eighteen-year old player. "We were looking and asking who you were and if you were interested in coming to Cal State L.A" Cuellar told Sanchez. His reputation off the pitch proved to be enough. Between a soccer scholarship and financial aid, Sanchez was given a full ride. At CSULA Sanchez continued to grow as an attacking player. If his shot from afar and vision made him a threat, he now developed the ability to dribble past two and three defensive players. His effort and play were rewarded with a 1st Team All-CCAA selection two years in a row, and All-Far West Region 1st Team Honors his senior year.

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The fulfillment of Sanchez and his father's dream to be a professional Mexican soccer player seemed to be within reach as he was sent to play for Pumas in Mexico City. He left Gaby, his high school sweetheart and current wife, and family, and headed to the Mexican capital. The Pumas roster was filled with national team players, like Jorge Campos and "Capi" Perales. While his teammates dubbed him "Bush," after the U.S. President George Bush, they treated him "very well." Yet, the Mexican-born, but U.S.-raised Juan Sanchez felt, once again, very much like the first grader standing in the nurses office at Maxon elementary. "I didn't speak the language as well I should because I had the English background. I felt like the odd man out. A lot of it has to do with trying to be part of both." After four months of training, Pumas let him go.

Back in the U.S., Juan tried his luck with the shaky, amorphous scene that was U.S. professional soccer, still in its formative stages. From 1993 to 1997, the Continental Indoor Soccer League (CISL) was the only professional league in the United States; the equivalent of today's Major League Soccer. "I get here," Sanchez reflected on his Anaheim Splash try-out, "and there is over 100 players for two spots. And because I had just gotten back from Mexico, the altitude, having all the smock in me, I was one of the top two." After one year with Anaheim he was traded to Pittsburg Stingers, and then again to Detroit Safari in 1997, the league's final season. Both times he left Gaby and Alex, their new son, in Los Angeles.

Sanchez's professional soccer career, and his soccer dream in general, reached a precipice in Mexico. Tragically, the on-the-field success of his second division team, Inter-Tijuana, was eclipsed by management's poor administration. Players were not paid on time or treated well. The Mexican American players were housed in the owner's hotel, but the Mexican players, often along with their families, lived in unfurnished apartments. To add insult to injury, the team fought their way into the playoffs only to be told by the Federation that they were disqualified because the club had not paid its fees. For Sanchez, this was compounded by the fact that the team did not allow him to try out for the newly founded Major League Soccer in the U.S..

Sanchez's life-long soccer journey and shared futbolero dream ended in Tijuana. Like a deported migrant he returned home empty handed and found himself bitter, depressed, and disappointed. He vowed to leave soccer behind. The game, however, was not done with him. The head coach at Damien High School, a private and elite school for boys, invited Sanchez to be his assistant coach. He agreed. Between running drills on the pitch and substitute teaching at his old elementary, he found his way. Instead of seeing his journey as an unfulfilled dream, he began to appreciate all the things that he gained along the way -- particularly a college education. Soccer's roads, he found, had multiple and equally valid endings. Through coaching, he could send countless children of migrants down its many paths.

For the last fourteen years, his Mt. SAC Men's teams have made eight appearances in the State Final Four and won the state championship four consecutively from 2009 to 2012. And yet, when I asked him about his most memorable win, he pointed to a playoff game against Santa Ana College. Confident that they would beat Mt. SAC, Santa Ana booked their hotel rooms for the Final Four to be held in Lemoore, CA, a long drive from Southern California. There was very little indication that this was an unwise move. Nobody, except the Mt. SAC coaching staff and its players, believed they could win. Talent and history were on Santa Ana's side, but it was hard work and not talent that was the deciding factor. It is the lesson from this game that defines Sanchez's approach to coaching. "Honestly, to me, its not about the championships," he affirmed, "its about developing the individual, developing these young kids into young men. Realizing that soccer is similar to life: what you put into it, how hard you work at it, how hard you commit to yourself, that part of it, whatever you do in life, is gonna give you the state championship."

If life is like soccer, then its many lessons are to be found in the journey as well its destination. The son of Mexican migrants, Sanchez grew up in the working class neighborhoods of the San Gabriel Valley. Through soccer he received a college education, traveled to Mexico City, across the United States and to Tijuana, before finally finding his home at Mt. SAC. It is here, at the community college, that he opens doors and sets many local first generation college students on their own journeys. Over the last fourteen years his players have received scholarships to play at numerous four-year universities, which include UC Berkeley, UCSB, UCI, UCR, CSUN, CSUF, CSULA, the University of Connecticut. Others, like this current PhD Candidate in history at Columbia and Garey alumn, have gone on to excel in the classroom. Today the generational dream of playing professional soccer continues with his own son, Alex, a red-shirt sophomore at the University of Connecticut. From California, Juan, Aurelio, and the Sanchez family, support and encourage Alex in his own futbolero dream.

Photos courtesy of Juan Sanchez.

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Posted In Search of Buried Histories in El Monte and South El Monte to Departures Columnstag:www.kcet.org,2014:/socal/departures/columns//1488.795892015-01-09T21:35:11Z2015-04-21T23:54:26ZArmed with a desire to insert the voices of Mexican migrant families into the official narrative, we set out to construct an archive for and with the communities of South El Monte and El Monte.Romeo Guzmánhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1488&id=17555In Partnership with the South El Monte Arts Posse

"East of East" is a series of original essays about people, things, and places in South El Monte and El Monte. The material traces the arrival and departures of ethnic groups, the rise and decline of political movements, the creation of youth cultures, and the use and manipulation of the built environment. These essays challenge us to think about the place of SEM/EM in the history of Los Angeles, California, and Mexico.
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Our pioneers, the Mexican migrant families who made South El Monte and El Monte home, did not write memories, and until very recently did not hold political office. Yet, like today's migrants they constructed the cities' buildings, picked the vegetables and fruits for its residents, and contributed to vibrant youth cultures of the era. Armed with a desire to insert these voices into the official narrative, we set out to construct an archive for and with these two communities. A year ago, in January and February of 2014, the South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP) and La Casa de El Hijo del Ahuizote conducted oral histories with the cities' older residents as well as more recent arrivals, hosted writing workshops at zumba studios and schools, took inventory of the trees that line some our streets, digitized family photographs, city documents, and punk fliers. This new material allowed us to write more than twenty essays, many of which are featured on our East of East column. However, our project generated as many questions as it did answers.

This year, for the next few days, we'll be following the archival trails that left us intrigued and more excited than ever to build an archive with our community. Through the History in Action Project Award at Columbia University, Nick Juravich, Daniel Morales (both PhD Candidates in history) and SEMAP will be looking for El Monte and South El Monte residents, former and current, who were involved in the founding of the city of South El Monte, educators from the 1960s to 1980s, and barrio residents and Bracero workers.

Here is what we know, some what we don't know, and how you can help.

In Search of Juan Mejia and South El Monte's Lost Murals

By Romeo Guzman

A year ago, South El Monte city officials provided SEMAP with access to their unclassified and mostly unorganized material for our archive project. In City Hall's basement, we quietly and gently opened boxes, emptied folders, and looked through thousands of photographs. We found black and white photos depicting ordinary but lovely scenes of life around the city -- the dirt stretch of Rush Street in the 1960s, boxing matches and summer days at the swimming pools frozen in action, a beauty contest held at Golfland, young boys playing baseball and football, and to our surprise photographs of murals from an unknown area, of which no trace remains.

And then there's Juan Mejia. Juan Mejia on the phone. Juan Mejia lounging, his feet on his desk. Juan Mejia striking a pose.The more we photos we found of Juan the funnier it seemed and the more intrigued we became. Juan was everywhere and yet we had no idea who he was or what he did. Then, finally a clue, Juan Mejia holding a sign that read: "Juan Mejia Human Resources." But this didn't make sense. Juan was never pictured in a tie or suit, he had long hair and fashionable shirts. He was certainly performative for the camera. He didn't seem like the kind of guy responsible for hiring and firing people.

Flash forward to January 2015. We pick up a 16 mm film of South El Monte from 1974, the same year the city won the City of Achievement Award and head to Echo Park Film Center. To our surprise it was a promotional film of South El Monte, which lauded among other things its youth programs: gang prevention, battle of the bands, and the painting of murals in South El Monte! And there with the youth, we found Juan Mejia. We did some research and discovered that during this time period, Human Resources was the name of departments across the nation in charge of doing community outreach and usually consisted of members of the community with ties to local parents and youth. Rather than addressing maternity leaves or reviewing benefits packages, Human Resources was an entity with deep knowledge of and involvment with community.

We know a little bit more about Juan Mejia, but not much and even less about the youth who helped create these murals. Here is where you come in: we are asking the community to help us locate Juan Mejia, youth who were part of the mural project, and residents who lived in South El Monte from 1950 to 1970.

And, for those of you who are just now learning about South El Monte's lost murals: Please join us at this Saturday's event at 2 p.m. at the South El Monte Senior Center to view vintage 16mm film that includes footage of the long-disappeared murals and other aspects of South El Monte life. And of course, Juan Mejia.

Building El Monte's Immigrant roots.

By Daniel Morales

While today's El Monte and South El Monte are increasingly seen as diverse communities with immigrants from around the world, in many ways, this is a return to the past. In the early twentieth century, as the San Gabriel Valley was being transformed by railroads and farming, immigrants came from around the world. Migrants from the U.S. eastcoast and the south were joined by Okies, Europeans, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican migrant workers. El Monte developed a ring of ethnic barrios where many of these newcomers lived. Some like Hicks Camp became long lived vibrant communities, while others disappeared relatively quickly.

While we know a good deal about Hicks and Medina Court in El Monte, we know almost nothing about the barrios of South El Monte: La Mission and Canta Ranas, both once located in what is now the Whittier Narrows Parks. La Mision was probably a barrio named for its proximity to the original San Gabriel Mission by the Rio Hondo river, while Canta Ranas earned its name from the frogs and other animal life that sang long the local bodies of water. We also don't know a great deal of how these barrios interacted with each other. Did they all attend similar parties, for example? We do not know how migration into and out of the camps worked, or how circular migration to fields in Northern California operated. During an oral history with Joe Bautista, we learned that his family hired Braceros and invited them to share a song, a dance, and a plate of food at barrio gaterthings.

We would love to learn more about how the Bracero Program, the U.S.-Mexico temporary program from 1941 to 1965, and more contemporary migration have impacted these two communities. Did you grow up in one of the barrios? Was your father or grandfather a worker in the U.S-Mexico Bracero Program? Do you have photos or other material you would be willing to share? Your story is part of history, make it known!

More Fist-Pumps: Educators, Parents, and Students.

By Nick Juravich

Research can be tough, but there are wonderful moments in every project that make it all worthwhile (the old jock in me calls them "fist-pump" moments). Finding Fernando Ledesma's testimony in the oral history collection "Personal Stories from the El Monte Communities" from Rio Hondo College was a fist-pump moment. The USC track star and Marine Corps veteran came to El Monte to "work with some Mexican-American people that need models" as an educator and never left. In 1973, as economic crises wreaked havoc on working-class school districts, his wife pushed him to become principal at Mountain View High School, telling him "you went into [education] to help people in the community when they needed you." Ledesma tackled challenges of poverty, racism, and violence by harnessing "unbelievable" community support and building programs that "provided more jobs for people in the community, teachers as well as aides and kids." Today, the continuation high school in El Monte where he worked many nights and weekends in addition to his daily labor bears his name.

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In reading how Ledesma combined institutional and community resources across generations, races, and classes, I began to see a pattern of collaborative community development and civic participation in my other sources. It became the frame for my essay on South El Monte.

One year later, I've finally made it the San Gabriel Valley, and the fist-pumps keep coming. On Wednesday, I met Patsy Sutley, a parent, aide, CSEA president, and Mountain View District Board Member over the course of 50 years in El Monte. She invited her fellow campaigner Ida Werrett to join us, and we talked for over three hours about their many struggles as parents and educators, including a long battle over the school board in the late 1980s and 1990s. As they spoke of this fight, they flipped through their "war books," massive binders in which they had collected everything from newspaper clippings to board meeting minutes to election fliers to poems they had written. These "war books," which we hope to collect and digitize, offer a one-of-a-kind insider's view into the history of school politics and activism in the city.

Thursday yielded moving memories from Olga Gutierrez at El Monte's La Historia Society. Growing up in East L.A., teachers taped her mouth shut if she spoke Spanish, but she survived these traumas to attend college and become a teacher herself. After working with Cesar Chavez and the UFW, and with Sal Castro to coordinate the L.A. walkouts, Gutierrez came to teach in El Monte, helping students found a chapter of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Atzlan) at Mountain View while Ledesma was principal.

Every interview and every document adds a layer of complexity to this history. Sometimes there are moments of convergence, as when Gutierrez remembered how important it was that Ledesma hired locally to bring role models into schools. Other times, complications arise; a parent organization I wrote enthusiastically about in the 1970s became a major opponent of the CSEA in the 1980s.

While there will never be one simple story about the complexities of education, activism, and community, these new materials open up new possibilities. We would love to hear from students who attended Mountain View when Ledesma and Gutierrez worked there, from other school board campaigners from the 1990s, parents and members of PICA, CSEA, and MEChA. The more we can collect, the better the chance that someone can use these materials to have a fist-pump moment of their own.

Join the South El Monte Arts Posse, The City of South El Monte, and KCET Departures and share with us your stories this Saturday, January 10 at 10 a.m. at South El Monte Senior Center; and this Sunday, January 11 at 10 a.m. La Historia Society Museum in El Monte. Details here and here.

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Posted My Father's Charreria, My Rodeo to Artboundtag:www.kcet.org,2014:/arts/artbound//1834.717972014-04-09T08:00:00Z2014-07-03T17:49:30ZAfter his father's death, a belt buckle became the most significant object linking Romeo Guzmán to his father's past as a rodeo rider and Mexican migrant.Romeo Guzmánhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=17555

In partnership with Boom MagazineBoom: A Journal of California is a new, cross-disciplinary publication that explores the history, culture, arts, politics, and society of California.

Ramón Ayala and Los Bravos del Norte opened their set at Arena nightclub in Hollywood with "Que me lleve el diablo" on that night in 2004. 1 As the heartwrenching lyrics and Ayala's melodic accordion reached every corner of the club, Adrián Félix, at the time my roommate at UCLA, motioned with his eyebrows and index finger to two young women sitting at a table across the dance floor. Before we had even asked them to dance, sweat accumulated on my palms and a pool of moisture formed in my lower back. I knew how to dance about as well as many newly arrived Mexican immigrants are able to speak English. Instead of striking a beautiful balance of smooth, graceful, and intentional movement, I awkwardly jerked my partner forward, back, and to the side, occasionally bumping into other dancers. To make matters worse, the boots I borrowed from Adrián were one size too large. The double socks that I wore to rectify the situation only added to my tenuous footing. My pants for the night, also his, were the tightest I had ever worn, and the black Stetson hat and long-sleeve button-down shirt were just a little too big. The only thing that was mine, by way of my father, was a shiny nickel and brass belt buckle.

My first attempt to crossover into the regional Mexican music scene was about a decade before my days at UCLA. I grew up in Pomona, California, a predominately working-class neighborhood composed of African Americans and migrants from Mexico, Central America, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Vietnam. At school I played soccer on the playground, after school in the streets and our backyard, and on Sundays on worn, hole-filled soccer fields. I hung out with children of Mexican migrants like me, who mainly spoke Spanish as well as those who preferred to speak English like I did. At home, I listened to my older brother's music: Green Day, Nirvana, and Stone Temple Pilots, as well as classic bands like The Velvet Underground. It wasn't until I entered junior high, in the early 1990s, that I actively sought out music and dances.

Like many second-generation Mexicans in Southern California at the time, I fell into banda music's raucous embrace. Futboleros, rockeros, Morrissey aficionados, and even rappers like Akwid, donned paisa outfits and attended bailes. 2 Both young men and women wore tight pants, cowboy boots, cintos piteados, and leather vests adorned with regional hometown or home state identification as well as paisa imagery -- a cockfight, bull riders, horses. Usually silk crema de seda shirts, often intricate Versace knock-offs that incorporated paisa designs, were worn solely by young men. To complete the outfit, young people hung a correa, a miniature leather horsewhip, from their belt loops. Lacking money from a part-time job, I used all of my available resources to put together a passable outfit. In my father's closet, I found solid-colored silk shirts and more stylized ones that clearly dated themselves to the 1980s, though they lacked paisa motifs. Aside from being made of silk, they had very little in common with the crema de seda shirts. From the corner of my father's sock and underwear drawer, I dug out a shiny belt buckle featuring a man astride a bucking bull. I was out of luck in the shoe department: my normally cool-looking Adidas Sambas stuck out pretty badly on the dance floor. I attended a few backyard parties and quinceañeras, but ultimately felt too awkward in my pseudo-paisa outfits. In high school, I continued to listen to Banda El Recodo, Banda El Limon, and the norteño band Los Tigres del Norte, but at dances sported soccer jerseys and T-shirts, always with the classic black-and-white Adidas Sambas.

In both of these two periods and outfits, however, my father's belt buckle remained at the center of my clumsy and piecemeal efforts to enter the Los Angeles banda and norteño scenes. My father told me it was a gift. A friend had given it to him after he rode his first bull. But that was about all I knew. For many years, I imagined him learning to ride bulls on a small ranch in Jalisco or in La Ceja, Zacatecas, where he grew up, under the mentorship of a wise old viejito, a charro guru. Maybe I, as his son, with the belt buckle as my center of gravity, could conquer dancing, and through this movement claim for myself a direct connection to the Mexican countryside and thus Mexicaness.

In 2007, as I prepared to leave California for graduate school, I asked my father more about the belt buckle. I was surprised to find out that he learned to ride bulls in Santa Barbara in the 1980s. A white man named Tom taught him. Tom, as a gesture of friendship, gave him the belt buckle after he rode his first bull. The buckle, like Tom, is American. I placed the belt buckle in my suitcase and didn't think much more about its history.

When my father passed away on 13 August 2013, the buckle became the most significant object linking me to my father, to his past. I was consumed with a desire to know more about it and my father. I pored over photo albums in the garage, watched American rodeo competitions on television, asked my mother about my father's bull-riding days, and read about American rodeos and charrería. I came to appreciate that the belt buckle's narrative, including my own imagined one, is a quintessentially migrant, Mexican, and Californian story. Let us start at the beginning: before the United States -- Mexico border was erected, before the rise of the US and Mexican nation-states.

Rodeo's roots go back to the Spanish conquest. Scholars aptly describe the conquest as an encounter between two distinct civilizations, noting the arrival of new diseases, technology, and animals to the Americas. John Lockhart, Caterina Pizzigoni, and other historians document the movement of ideas and practices between Spaniards and indigenous populations. 3

They highlight the transformation of language, the changing layout of indigenous homes, and perhaps most emblematically, the forging of a new Catholicism. These new practices, of course, took place within a strict racial hierarchy and rigid monitoring of social practices, where Spanish priests often prohibited indigenous populations from practicing their own religion.

The collective practices known as charrería, notes Mary Lou Compte, are a product of this complicated and nuanced dynamic, with the fiesta as its main source. Colonial society celebrated "anniversaries of saints, local traditions, pagan gods, special fairs and markets, and patriotic holidays" by dancing, listening to music, gambling, drinking, engaging in sport, praying, and attending mass. 4

In the sixteenth century, sporting activities included fighting on horseback with lances as well as grabbing bulls by the tail and throwing them to the ground. 5

The growth of ranching during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to the evolution of charreria. As rules prohibiting non-Spaniards from riding horses eased up and more and more indigenous and mestizos began working on haciendas, a "uniquely Mexican sport" emerged: charreada or charrería, events that showcased the skills of charros, the horsemen. 6

Nueva España, a colony of Spain, extended well into the present day U.S. Southwest, with ranching reaching California by the mid-eighteenth century. As late as the 1860s, the culture of the charros maintained a strong presence throughout California. In Santa Barbara, the pastoral economy connected classes and helped create community identity and cohesion, argues historian Albert Camarillo. 7

The Mexican-American War of 1848, dubbed La invasión norteamericana by Mexicans, brought many changes, among them an influx of white Americans. As Mexicans and white Americans worked together on cattle ranches, the latter adopted many of the skills and techniques of Mexican charros or vaqueros. It was during this period that white Americans began to host events that "featured most of the very same contests that continued to be part of the traditional Hispanic celebrations," writes Compte, "including bull fights, bull riding, corer al gallo, sortijas, picking up objects, steer roping, team roping, and bronc riding." 8

The American cowboy was on the horizon, but the charro was still the main man in the arena.

From 1883 to 1916, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows toured throughout the United States and presented Americans with a romantic and gloried image of the American cowboy. At the same time that the cowboy became ingrained in the American imagination, the political, social, and economic decline of the Mexican community in Santa Barbara was solidified. During the 1860s and 1870s, the local pastoral economy slowly lost out to the capitalist economy, which produced new jobs in tourisms, construction, and commercial agriculture. By the 1890s it was not uncommon to find entire Mexican families working in fruit canneries, in the almond industry, and harvesting walnuts. Along with these changes came a loss of political power and the creation of Mexican barrios. By the end of the century, 90 percent of the Mexican population lived in a seven-block radius between Vine and State Street, known as Pueblo Viejo. These changes, writes Camarillo, established the social, political, and economic conditions of the twentieth century. With the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, and especially World War I, newly arrived Mexicans entered a segmented labor system and helped form a second barrio on the lower eastside, between Milpas, Ortega, and State Street. 9

As the Santa Barbara that we would recognize today took form, the American rodeo moved away from its Mexican past and into the realm of sport. In 1922, the first World's Championship Cowboy Contest took place at Madison Square Garden in New York. By 1936, practices now associated with rodeo were organized into a single sport and, according to Compte "promoted the myth that their sport came directly from informal contests among Anglo cowboys, ignoring the Hispanic influence along with the theatrical." 10 South of the US-Mexico border a similar consolidation took place. After the Mexican Revolution, there was an effort by the state, intellectuals, and citizens to define Mexico's past and present as well as to make Indians, peasants, and other corporate groups into "good Mexican citizens." 11

In 1933, the same year as the founding of the Federación Mexicana de Charros, President Abelardo L. Rodríguez declared charrería Mexico's national sport. 12

As the century progressed, the image of the American cowboy and Mexican charro grew in strength while they grew apart, ensuring the divorce of American rodeo from its Mexican influence and past. By the 1990s, when I was in high school, Clint Eastwood was an all-American cowboy and Vicente Fernandez was Mexico's favorite charro -- and they had next to nothing in common in my mind.

Nicolás Guzmán was born on a small ranch called Los Pozitos in La Ceja, García de la Cadena, Zacatecas, in 1958. He was the third child of José María Guzmán Castañeda and María Arellano Prieto de Guzmán. The family worked a small plot of land and subsisted by planting corn, beans, and other vegetables. Like many other Zacatecano families, they migrated south, to the developing state of Jalisco.

In 1966 José María, his wife María, and their three children Santos, Manuel, and Nicolás settled in the Colonia Santa Margarita, a poor working-class neighborhood near the city of Guadalajara. During this time, José María supported his expanding family by working in the United States for a few months at a time. My grandmother recalls that he first migrated in 1958, as a contracted bracero. Like other men, he overstayed his contract and found other work. But even with the dollars he sent south, his family struggled economically. Led by Manuel, the oldest son, they did their best to scrap together a living. Manuel sold insurance; the younger boys sold gum on city buses and shined shoes just outside of Guadalajara's Cathedral. María took in other people's laundry and, along with the girls, maintained a tidy home.

These were challenging times for the family, but the boys, my uncles, have fond memories of their youth. There was little that Manuel, Nicolás, and the two younger brothers, Lupe and Ismael, loved more that playing and watching soccer. They cheered for America, a Mexican national club team from Mexico City, and the bitter rivals of Guadalajara's Chivas. Indeed, their love for the game has transcended time and space, and imparted the new generation with a poetic appreciation of the game and some skills to play it. In our most-recent small-sided game, Maylo (short for Ismael) told us why my father decided to become a goalie. During a hard-fought match at Estadio Jalisco, America's goalie Prudencio Cortes made numerous saves, including a set of three consecutive shots on goal from close range. Nicolas was hooked.

His first goalie jersey was an American high school letterman sweater that his father bought at a second hand store in the United States. The goals he defended were all on hard dirt fields with rocks scattered throughout the pitch. At only 5 feet, 7 inches and 130 pounds, Nicolás was not the strongest nor most athletic youngster. Luckily, in the goal, measuring and calculating one's position is as important as one's athletic ability. The difference between a save and a goal is often contingent on shuffling one's feet no more than a foot or two before the opposing player takes a shot and then, of course, the actual dive. By diving at a slight forward angle the goalie can meet the ball early on in its trajectory, cutting it off before it moves farther and farther away from one's body and hands. My father imparted these insights to me during drills and penalty kicks in our backyard, directly in front of a makeshift soccer goal that we constructed using white PVC pipes. By his own admission he never mastered diving at a slight forward angle. Yet the careful observation and meticulous calculations required of a goalie fit well with Nicolás's appreciation of math and his often neurotic tendencies. Untied shoelaces, unmade beds, and carelessly scattered toys troubled his sense of, and need for, order. I suspect this is why he enjoyed the responsibility of being the last man and having a type of horizontal bird's eye perspective of the field. From the goal, one can see all the offensive plays develop and more importantly, can yell out instructions to one's fellow players. And of course, he also enjoyed the acrobatics of being goalie. He loved that whether he was diving up to block a shot near the top of the cross bar or down to the ground, he had to consistently fight and defy gravity, all while ensuring a safe and soft landing.

During the week, Nicolás spent his days and evenings working at Musica Lemus, a record store in downtown, Guadalajara. This provided him access to all the latest music and a future playlist for his car, truck, and home stereo: English giants like the Beatles, French divas like Francoise Hardy, the international and trilingual star Jannette, Dan Fogelberg, Don McLean, John Denver, and others. Nicolás did not know French or English, but this did not matter; like others of his generation, he sang along, making up the meaning of each word, refrain, and chorus. His pants, like his hair were long, flowing out at their ends.

This modern urban sensibility was coupled with a romantic idealism for the countryside. From his childhood, Nicolás retained memories of large open spaces and a rugged simplicity. These visions of Zacatecas were layered with portraits of the American West from films, particularly those of his favorite cowboy, Clint Eastwood, whom he preferred over John Wayne. Nicolás didn't buy Wayne's portrayal of cowboy life, finding it inauthentic and Wayne himself a few pounds too heavy to be a "real cowboy." In both the American West and rural Mexico, Nicolás found simplicity, dignity, and directness. One of his most common expressions, often evoked as a demand for clarity, was "vamos al grano." The English translation for grano is grain or bean, and the expression vamos al grano is understood to mean "let's get to the point," or "let's get to root of it."

In the summer of 1977, Nicolás met Francisca. She was born and raised in Guadalajara, but had moved to Mexicali and then later to South El Monte in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles, where she completed the last two years of high school. That summer, she, along with her siblings, lived in the Colonia Santa Margarita, just a few blocks from the Guzmán household. After only two weeks of going out and very much al grano, Nicolás confessed to Francisca that he wanted to marry her. After that summer, they sent dozens of postcards and letters and visited each other in Guadalajara and South El Monte as often as possible. A year later, they got married in Guadalajara and a year after that migrated to Los Angeles.

Desperate for work and without much luck in Los Angeles, Nicolás reached out to his father. At the time, José María was working for a landscaping company in Santa Barbara pruning trees and living near Milpas Street, in the historic Mexican barrio of Santa Barbara. José María found Nicolás a job working as a field hand on a ranch in Montecito, a wealthy city near Santa Barbara. Nicolás worked alongside several white Americans, including Tom. It was with these white American men and not a Mexican vaquero that he learned to ride bulls.

The key to a successful ride lies in careful attention to detail, split-second decision-making, and purposeful and graceful movement as much as strength -- much like guarding the goal in soccer. Great bull riders make this all look easy, but the various factors to consider are pretty daunting. Bulls use their speed, power, and movement to throw off a bull rider. They can change direction, buck and kick their legs in numerous directions, and drop the front of their body. To stay on, bull riders use their inner thigh muscles and legs to embrace the body of the bull, move their groin and upper body in response to the bull's movement, and try to maintain a center of gravity. Hitting the ground, of course, is inevitable for every bull rider. As the cowboy saying goes, "There was never a horse that couldn't be rode; there never was a man that couldn't be throwed." 13

Tom taught Nick, as they affectionately called him, the basics on small bulls in the open range and gave him the belt buckle after he successfully rode his first bull. Nick wore it to formal and informal bull-riding events throughout Santa Barbara County. On one occasion, with José María in the audience, he successfully rode a bull for eight seconds, scoring the highest points and taking home a small pot of money. Nick rode bulls from 1979 to 1981, leaving bull riding when he took his wife and three children, including me, back to Guadalajara.

Although he never returned to bull riding, the belt buckle remained a mainstay in his wardrobe. He wore it with regular T-shirts, polo shirts, and long-sleeve dress shirts. For Nicolás, the buckle was a point of pride, as it is for many rodeo riders. The history of rodeo buckles is relatively recent, and tied to the recent history of rodeo. In the late nineteenth century, cowboys wore suspenders instead of belts. With the rise of organized rodeo competitions, belt buckles were awarded as trophies. As the twentieth century progressed, it became easier to mass-produce belt buckles, increasing their popularity and use. 14 Today, buckles continue to be awarded as prizes at rodeo competitions and worn inside and outside of formal events.

Approximately 2 inches in circumference and made of nickel giving it some heft, my father's belt buckle has at its center, in brass relief, a man on top of a bucking bull, the man's right hand waving in the air. It can pass for Mexican, but more because of the great diversity of Mexican belt buckles than for its own intrinsic qualities. Mexican belts and buckles vary in size, material, and imagery. One of the most common belts is the cinto piteado. Pita, a fiber found in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, is stitched into leather to form floral, charrería, prehispanic patterns and imagery, and individuals' initials and hometown. This artisanal practice has its roots in Spanish leather handcraft, with noticeable Arab influences. Interestingly, the mecca for cintos piteados is Colotlán, a small town at the northern tip of the state of Jalisco. 15 Due the state of Jalisco's strange configuration, Colotlán, is 75 miles north of my father's birthplace, García de la Cadena, Zacatecas, and about 125 miles north of the city of his youth, Guadalajara. In addition to the cinto piteado, there are large, oval, buckles, made from a variety of metals and sometimes the horn of a bull.

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The narrative I have now constructed about the origins of my father's belt buckle, particularly where and how he learned to ride bulls, fits well within what we know about Mexican migrants and migration. Yet, Nicolás's story also illustrates how much the lines between rural and urban and Mexican and American blur into and layer on top of each other. More importantly, my father and I, just like other migrants and children of migrants of our respective generations, used available resources -- like the rodeo buckle -- to connect with Mexico and identify as Mexican. I believe that bull riding was an expression of both my father's romantic and idealist vision of American cowboy culture and his place of birth, La Ceja, Zacatecas. His vision of both these places was mediated through his experience as a young man in the urban city of Guadalajara. Some of the skills that bull riding required were fostered in the goal on dirt soccer fields. That he learned to ride a bull from a white American, speaks to the movement of people, popular culture, and everyday practices across the US-Mexico border. The belt buckle contains and represents this complex and nuanced narrative. This is why my father cherished it so much and why it has served me as a type of amulet. It came with me when I left California to attend Columbia University, in New York City, for doctoral studies in History. I wore it to my first graduate seminar, to the first lecture I gave on migration, and to my discussion sections with undergraduates. And, I wear it now, as I sit in a Mexico City coffee shop, writing out its history.

3 James Lockhart, "The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Century" (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). Caterina Pizzigoni. "The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico's Toluca Valley," 1650-1800. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

4 Mary Lou LeCompte, "The Hispanic Influence on the History of Rodeo, 1823-1922," Journal of Sport History 12 (Spring 1985): no.1, 22.